The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.

Message from the Developers - The road ahead

It's been almost 3 years since the last stable release, so here's a new one...

Now, over 6 years after the first days of Lord of the Test, and more than 5 years after it first appeared on github, work on this version has come to an end.

While it's not perfect, it has certainly come a long way since its first days, when it began life as a modpack, rather than a game. It originally used just the default mapgen, now it has it's own special one - albeit imperfect. There are a greater variety of mobs, more features, fewer bugs. The features of the Minetest engine have advanced incredibly. Both of us have learnt a lot in terms of coding, design, planning and building a game. We've had help with coding from people from all over the globe. We've had support from countless people, some who have been in Minetest since the very start of Lord of the Test, some who joined later and are still with us, and others who have left, for one reason or another. At one time, there was support for both Minetest and Freeminer! There have been various servers running Lord of the Test, some managed and developed by us, some independently.

There's still a lot of work which could be done on it, a lot of features that could be added, but the base which it is all built upon still has large parts of code from 2013, when neither of us had an idea of how to code, or of what direction we wanted the game to go in. So a lot of the code one finds in the game is messy, unreadable, a combination of mods forced to work together. The game is based on Minetest Game, but since the time we made that our base, it has only been synced a few times, the last many years ago, and now, there is a lot of content in it that we feel would be unsuited for Middle Earth. In addition, we have changed a lot of the mods from Minetest Game to a greater or lesser extent, making the task of updating them rather daunting. But, at the same time, this means that we lose out on many of the bugfixes/performance improvements/security fixes which have been added. In addition to all of this, since we have our base in Minetest Game, it looks as if mods supporting Minetest Game should be compatible with Lord of the Test, when in actual fact, they are often not, due to part of the game overriding them, or causing crashes when they use functions from Minetest Game which were only added later.

So, when we considered the way forward, we had two possibilities ahead of us. Either, we could have decided to go through all of the code, back-porting fixes, rewriting messy portions, redesigning what we didn't like, updating Minetest Game, or, we could rewrite the game from scratch. This decision wasn't easy to make, and it took a long time to reach, with many discussions (some rather heated!) along the way. But in the end, we both decided that the best course of action was to redo everything from scratch, coding our own systems as much as possible, and focusing on a coherent, unique design.

If you've been following the development of Lord of the Test rewrite on Github, you may have seen that work has been going into this for the past couple of years. There's not been an awful lot of progress, as both of us have been very busy, but work is slowly progressing forward. Below, you'll see a few of the things that we want to do with the rewrite.

We will rename Lord of the Test to "Lord of the Test: Third Age (LTTA)". The main focus for LTTA is optimized code and polished features, and through that, the rewrite will feature a range of new efficient and polished features. Among some things to expect are;

A new mapgen, with lots of biomes, which is accurate to Middle-Earth geography rather than scattered randomly-placed biomes.

Various gameplay systems will be re-hauled to fit better within the context of LTTA, some examples are farming, weapons, crafting, armour, inventory, all providing new and different polished gameplay.

Work is being put into the various visuals too, with nice new textures, new mobs models and even a new, unique player model!

Simply put, expect LTTA to be vastly different from LOTT!

All of these things are just what we've got planned for the beginning, later on, there'll be an even greater variety of content, including a whole new quests system, a dialogue system, a complete array of mobs, and so much more! But all of this will take time. We remain busy, and are likely to be so for the foreseeable future. So, if you want to help in shaping Middle Earth in Minetest, get in touch!

Thank you all for your support and help along the journey - we wouldn't have been able to this far without your help! While this part of the road is over, there is an even bigger one ahead of us! The journey is exciting, and who knows where it will lead? Stay tuned for more information, and if you want, keep an eye out for a possible new development blog here!

- fishyWET (neinwhal) & Amaz

Future of LOTT
For the time-being, until LTTA is stable and complete enough for a release, LOTT is still the main stable version.
LOTT however, have reached an "End of Development" stage.
Since the game has reached its end of development, no more new features should be added.
LOTT will now be strictly restricted to only bugfixes or minor improvements (guide edits/additions and rebalances only if really needed). Only bugfix releases will be released.

If you wish to contribute to LOTT, please see CONTRIBUTING.md for further information.
If you wish to contribute to LTTA however, see the developer message above.

What's New?
With that however, the final version of LOTT does come with a couple new features, and much overdue rebalances & fixes.
See the changelog for a full list!
But most important of which is, guides/handbooks are now added, basically serving as ingame wiki, which should hopefully explain some of the new and existing features that are a bit unclear without reading the code.
They spawn in generated structures' chests.

For a list of guides, where they spawn and what info they entail, see here.

But that's about it for the final release of LOTT. We will see you in LTTA!

I've been working on a new way of having ores generate underground, to make the underground more interesting, and so that it's not just the case that every ore appears everywhere underground in more or less the same manner, but with various quantities...

Only just starting on it, but here's a sample for tin:
It occurs in bands the 1st of which goes from -70 to -90, the 2nd, -240 - -270, the 3rd, -470 - -520, the 4th, -750 - -820, and the 5th, from -1000 to -1100. Each of the bands has a unique distribution of tin.
If you find the last layer, you're more or less sorted for tin:
But those kind of formations aren't easy to find even there.
I have to say that I'm quite pleased with the balance as you go down, as each layer is a small (or not so small in the case of the last one!) increase from the previous one.
In the case of the last layer, if you just mine through that layer, chances are, you won't find any, and even if you do find a big cave, still quite unlikely that you'll find one... But if you do, hundreds or thousands of tin lumps will await you, actually, more than you'd ever need really, especially by the time you got down to that depth...!

A deceptive patch of tin in a cave:

An advanced player might pass it by, thinking "Ah, I can't be bothered to get that tin. There's not that much there after all, and it's not of much use to me."

But a beginner might see it, go for the tin and mine it, and then be rewarded by this:

And that's just one of the ores! All of them will have different spawning patterns. So some will be in bands, some will be scattered throughout. Some will be very hard to come across, but when you find them, you should be sorted for a while!!

I like the updated textures for the ores. Makes 'em look more like metal chunks in the stone. As far as ores are concerned, some metals, like gold, actually do appear on the ground, so small clumps of gold ore randomly spawning aboveground would be realistic.

Oh, in terms of textures, I've actually got new ones for all of the ores, now you mention it:
What the ores are, clockwise from top left: Gold, Lead, Silver, Tin, Iron, Copper. As you can see, I've tried to have a bit of variety again, with some ores having a more vein like structure, and others a more nuggety form. I based the textures off various different kinds of ores I looked up, so there's a semblance of reality to them!

It would be nice to be able to find gold nuggets (and maybe other metals) on the ground.

I'm returning to minetest after a long time away, and get many errors trying to get your game to work. What combination of environment is needed to get it to work in the 'award winning' way, without needing to perform many manual patches. I followed a bunch of the manual patches on github issues, which progressed, but still had others not addressed, and there must be a combination of component versions that 'just work' - otherwise how could the game be 'award winning'.

Your answer might also be useful to add to the first message of the page (17 pages ago) so that others will benefit.

I've tried versions 1.2.1 and 1.1.0 of the game, using minetest 5.2 and 4.17. There may be other variables to toy with such as which mapgen version (?), but I'm not sure, and really I had an expectation that the stable version would 'just work' since it's an award winner, so it would be nice to have the all requirements clearly listed on the front-page.

I'm returning to minetest after a long time away, and get many errors trying to get your game to work. What combination of environment is needed to get it to work in the 'award winning' way, without needing to perform many manual patches. I followed a bunch of the manual patches on github issues, which progressed, but still had others not addressed, and there must be a combination of component versions that 'just work' - otherwise how could the game be 'award winning'.

Your answer might also be useful to add to the first message of the page (17 pages ago) so that others will benefit.

I've tried versions 1.2.1 and 1.1.0 of the game, using minetest 5.2 and 4.17. There may be other variables to toy with such as which mapgen version (?), but I'm not sure, and really I had an expectation that the stable version would 'just work' since it's an award winner, so it would be nice to have the all requirements clearly listed on the front-page.

sound!!! thanks for that much appricated .
any chance you can get the bugfix release to show up on the online content browser as an update . users are not going to see the fix here if they rely on the browser for updates . it would be a shame for them to miss out.

sound!!! thanks for that much appricated .
any chance you can get the bugfix release to show up on the online content browser as an update . users are not going to see the fix here if they rely on the browser for updates . it would be a shame for them to miss out.

excellent!
i have already updated manually so was unable to check if that is now reflected in the engines online content browser . i really hope so as LOTT is far to good to miss .
I had tried it a couple of times and abandoned it due to crashes . so glad i spotted your post here as i am now utterly immersed . its exactly the type of non tech theme i was looking for . really great to spawn into a living breathing world such as this and find new entities that i have not seen before . I got my eye on LOTTR too . but for the present this will keep me nicely occupied . really appriciate the great work you have put into this as right from the moment i spawned i could tell it was going to be somthing special .